to each other, and with no suspicion that they are as incapable of interchanging ideas as the inhabitants of two different planets.  With what heart-stirring mirth, and yet with what strangely deeper feeling of the infinite variety of human nature, do we follow their converse throughout!  Yet Quixote and Sancho are not more life-like and human, nor nearer together at one point and farther apart at another, than are Walter Shandy and his brother.  The squat little Spanish peasant is not more gloriously incapable of following the chivalric vagaries of his master than the simple soldier is of grasping the philosophic crotchets of his brother.  Both couples are in sympathetic contact absolute and complete at one point; at another they are “poles asunder” both of them.  And in both contrasts there is that sense of futility and failure, of alienation and misunderstanding—­that element of underlying pathos, in short, which so strangely gives its keenest salt to humour.  In both alike there is the same suggestion of the Infinite of disparity bounding the finite of resemblance—­of the Incommensurable in man and nature, beside which all minor uniformities sink into insignificance.

The pathetic element which underlies and deepens the humour is, of course, produced in the two cases in two exactly opposite ways.  In both cases it is a picture of human simplicity—­of a noble and artless nature out of harmony with its surroundings—­which moves us; but whereas in the Spanish romance the simplicity is that of the incompris, in the English novel it is that of the man with whom the incompris consorts.  If there is pathos as well as humour, and deepening the humour, in the figure of the distraught knight-errant talking so hopelessly over the head of his attached squire’s morality, so too there is pathos, giving depth to the humour of the eccentric philosopher, shooting so hopelessly wide of the intellectual appreciation of the most affectionate of brothers.  One’s sympathy, perhaps, is even more strongly appealed to in the latter than in the former case, because the effort of the good Captain to understand is far greater than that of the Don to make himself understood, and the concern of the former at his failure is proportionately more marked than that of the latter at his.  And the general rapport between one of the two ill-assorted pairs is much closer than that of the other.  It is, indeed, the tantalizing approach to a mutual understanding which gives so much more subtle a zest to the humour of the relations between the two brothers Shandy than to that which arises out of the relations between the philosopher and his wife.  The broad comedy of the dialogues between Mr. and Mrs. Shandy is irresistible in its way:  but it is broad comedy.  The philosopher knows that his wife does not comprehend him:  she knows that she never will; and neither of them much cares.  The husband snubs her openly for her mental defects, and she with perfect placidity